Federal Court Rules Police Can Lawfully Execute Your Dog If It Barks In Their Presence

If your dog is the type that barks at dangerous-looking strangers or rushes to your defense if it senses that you’re in danger, you’d best teach it to keep quiet and freeze solid as a rock if it sees men dressed in blue. Even then, you’d best stick a go-pro to it just to make certain that you’ve got evidence proving that your dog wasn’t a threat to anybody before it inevitably gets shot 3-5 times.

The 6th Circuit Court has ruled that an officer can legally execute your dog if it barks or moves in a case where officers shot a dog that “had only moved a few inches” and a second that was “just standing there”.

This horrific example shows how little it would take for an officer to be able to justifiably execute an animal.

Officer Klein testified that after he shot and killed the first dog, he noticed the second dog standing about halfway across the basement. The second dog was not moving towards the officers when they discovered her in the basement, but rather she was “just standing there,” barking and was turned sideways to the officers. Klein then fired the first two rounds at the second dog.

After it hid in a corner, another officer decided to shoot it again, claiming that it had moved. A third officer found it hiding behind the furnace, observed “blood coming out of numerous holes in the dog, and . . . [Officer Case] didn’t want to see it suffer” and decided to execute it – apparently in order to put it out of the misery that his colleagues had already caused it.

“The standard we set out today is that a police officer’s use of deadly force against a dog while executing a warrant to search a home for illegal drug activity is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment when, given the totality of the circumstances and viewed from the perspective of an objectively reasonable officer, the dog poses an imminent threat to the officer’s safety,” Judge Eric Clay wrote in the court’s opinion.

The court found that the plaintiffs could not provide evidence proving that the first dog had not lunged at the officers and that the second dog did not bark – evidence of this nature is not only impossible to produce, but the officers had already admitted to firing at a dog that had only been barking – an interpretation of imminent danger that when extended to people could be interpreted as a man facing away from the officer and shouting at someone.